Windows and OS X Boot Camp: running Redmond at “Retina” resolution

The trials and tribulations of running Windows 7 on a Retina MacBook Pro.

We already gave you our impressions of running OS X on Apple's Retina MacBook Pro, as well as how to maximize battery life by overriding the automatic GPU switching. Since we still had the hardware at our disposal, however, readers expressed interest in knowing how Windows runs at the Retina MacBook Pro's ultra-high resolution.

So I downloaded the latest Windows 7 ISO, grabbed an 8GB USB flash drive, and fired up Boot Camp Assistant. After a couple hours of downloads and two failed install attempts, I was able to get Microsoft's OS purring along quite nicely on the Retina MacBook Pro hardware. Though I don't have much Windows software on hand to give a really in-depth impression of daily use, I was able to run some cross-platform benchmarks, browse the Web, do a little writing, and play around a bit with both Windows resolution and font-scaling settings.

Installing Windows

For those who haven't used Boot Camp before, the process is pretty straightforward. You'll need either a Windows 7 install disc and a USB SuperDrive, or an ISO of Windows 7. You can download the latter online, but you'll need a license key to activate it once installed. If you're installing from a downloaded ISO, you'll want an 8GB or larger flash drive. If you're installing from disc, you'll need at least a 1GB flash drive to download all the necessary drivers.

Once you have those, plug in your USB drive, launch Boot Camp Assistant, and simply follow the instructions. You'll need to partition your internal drive to give some space to Windows; I recommend at least 30GB at a bare minimum, depending on your software needs. More doesn't hurt, especially if you plan to run a lot of software concurrently—the virtual memory system can chew up quite a bit of space.

Once your drive is partitioned, you'll have to wait for Boot Camp Assistant to do its thing. I installed from an ISO, so that gets decoded and stored on the flash drive. Then various Windows 7-compatible drivers for the Retina MacBook Pro's hardware components are downloaded from Apple's servers (also stored on the flash drive). Finally, your Mac will boot into the Windows 7 installer. Format the "BOOTCAMP" partition as NTFS, and install away.

I should say it has been some time since I installed Windows, but the process didn't seem any different from what I remember. A relatively minor quibble: the first two attempts to install resulted in nothing but a blinking cursor. I ended up having to boot into OS X and re-run Boot Camp Assistant all over again to do the process over. I couldn't nail down the point of failure, so there's no way to know if it was an issue with Windows or with Apple's firmware. The third time was the charm, however.

Scaling: hit or miss

Once Windows installed and booted, you're greeted with a minuscule login screen. The problem is that until the Boot Camp control panel is loaded, Windows runs at the native 2880 x 1800 pixel resolution with a 1:1 pixel ratio. Naturally, every UI element is tiny. If you log out or reboot the machine, Windows will switch back to this tiny login screen. It doesn't make it unusable, but it is awkward; it can be difficult to even tell if you're typing in your password correctly or not.

However, the Boot Camp control panel sets Windows font scaling to a reasonable 150 percent setting right off the bat. Text was still a little small in some areas, but my relatively young eyes are still good, and I found UI elements to be comfortably sized.

I did experiment a bit with different resolution and scaling settings, including setting text to render at 100 and 125 percent. Frankly, these bordered on useless. UI elements were so small that they were hard to target, even using an external mouse. Accuracy with a trackpad was awkward at best at these settings.

There's no default 200 percent setting, which would be roughly equivalent with Apple's standard "Retina" optimized setting under OS X. However, you can use advanced settings to enable 200 percent scaling. Text at this setting looks amazing; I found that turning off ClearType made it look even better, as the benefits of the ClearType algorithm aren't necessary at "retina" resolutions.

Clicking on "custom DPI" in the Displays control panel makes it possible to activate a 200% scaling option.

Unfortunately, apps respond in inconsistent ways with the 200 percent setting. This includes Microsoft's own apps, like Office, as well as Windows itself. Some icons looked great; others looked like a pixelated mess. Font rendering also had a few artifacts, including some toolbar display type getting truncated instead of toolbars or buttons scaling to fit. Even the Windows mouse pointer looked jagged at 200 percent.

Enlarge/ Scaling Windows at 200% on a Retina MacBook Pro makes text look great, but the UI isn't as smooth at the default 150% scaling.

This inconsistency seems odd, given that Microsoft has been encouraging developers to support Windows' native scaling options for years. We think that "retina"-like displays will become the norm within a couple of years, so hopefully Windows developers will move to embrace these scaling options in the near future. Such scaling support is also a benefit to users with visual impairments, even when using existing monitors.

Enlarge/ Compare Firefox's tiny type and minuscule button icons to those of Microsoft Word 2010. Not all icons render smoothly, but at least the size is easy to target using a trackpad.

I also found the process of digging into the display settings to set a resolution and then going in to a separate control panel to change the text scaling to be cumbersome at best. This is clearly the result of the fundamental philosophical differences between Windows and OS X—Windows offers much more fine-grained control in exchange for added complexity. As we noted in our Retina MacBook Pro review, Apple's "recommended" settings really make it much easier to comfortably control screen resolution, though its options are more limited. Apple should be able to build a control panel that works with Windows' native system APIs for setting resolution and scaling combinations, so it would be nice if its engineers could add that option for "retina" equipped devices. (Microsoft should likewise consider taking a page from Apple's playbook here and consolidate resolution and scaling options into a single control panel.)

Windows 8 will have new scaling rules for Metro applications, so those should fare better on high-resolution displays. However, good scaling of desktop applications will still require developers to support it.

Snappy performance

Scaling issues aside, everything seemed (subjectively) as snappy as OS X during my "regular" workflow, which largely revolves around online reading and writing in a word processor or text editor. Getting used to the slightly different keyboard shortcuts and trackpad scrolling was the only real impediment to getting work done.

Objectively, the benchmarks I ran for comparison purposes really present a mixed picture. I used the cross-platform Geekbench, which gives a pretty decent picture of relative CPU and memory performance. However, I was surprised that Geekbench ran consistently faster—about 17 percent faster overall—on Windows than on OS X. Considering that the benchmark is made of identical computational functions and it was run on identical hardware, it seems reasonable that the difference could be chalked up to under-the-hood architectural differences between Windows and OS X.

Longer bars are better.

However, rendering benchmark Cinebench paints an entirely different picture. In the CPU-based tests, OS X ran about 20 percent faster. And, single-threaded performance was twice as fast. Clearly, each OS has areas that are better optimized than the other.

On the other hand, Windows turned in OpenGL performance that was about 5 frames per second better than OS X. While Apple has made some strides recently in improving OpenGL and graphics driver support, Windows still has an advantage here.

Longer bars are better.

Finally, we pitted Redmond's latest browser, Internet Explorer 9, on Windows against the latest version of Safari on OS X. Safari ran the Sunspider 0.9.1 JavaScript benchmark nearly three times as fast. Still, that doesn't mean IE9 is a sloth—it ran all the tests in under half a second. Subjectively, browsing a variety of websites didn't reveal any perceptible difference in overall performance.

Shorter bars are better.

Conclusion

Though Windows 7 doesn't quite have the same experience when it comes to resolution and scaling control as OS X does—it can be a bit of a chore to get it just the way you like it—it's still quite useable on the Retina MacBook Pro's 15" 2880 x 1800 pixel screen. I recommend running Windows at full resolution with the 150 percent scaling setting—that seemed to give the best overall usability. "Retina" class desktop displays are still a relative rarity today, so it will be some time before software developers adapt applications to best take advantage of such a resolution. In the meantime, you should have no trouble running Windows on the Retina MacBook Pro if the need arises.

Promoted Comments

I would like to see this redone with Windows 8 once Apple makes Boot Camp compatible with Windows 8 (the current BC drivers under Windows 8 are not fun) as Windows 8 is the version getting all primed for high scaling like in Retina screens.

How long ago was it that you tried the Windows 8 Boot Camp install? I just did this using a USB drive over this weekend with the Windows 8 Release Preview, and Boot Camp seemed to pick up the right drivers. Once I'd installed Windows 8 and run the Boot Camp driver installer, everything seemed to work just fine, from the GPU to the wireless networking and Bluetooth.

My experience was similar to Chris' in that I had to manually set text scaling to 200% to feel comfortable with it, but besides that it seems to handle the Retina display well. I was very impressed with the performance of a few games I got from Steam, such as Civ 5, where I can finally max out all the quality sliders and still have it run like butter.

If someone can point out what major issues they are seeing with IE9 scaling on websites I sure would like to know about it. It works great for me.

I've been running Win7 on the MacBook Pro with Retina display since the middle of June and it absolutely runs like a champ. Currently I'm running at 150% (144 DPI), but for casual web surfing I bump up IE9's zoom factor to 200%. I also turn on the "Windows XP" style scaling, which prevents the system from automatically scaling up applications that haven't declared in their manifest that they are DPI aware.

At 150% I will say that some things are too small and not every application adapts well, but as a huge fan of high DPI displays I'm willing to put up with it. Even in cases such as Lightroom where the application doesn't yet scale the extra screen real estate is great. For those who are curious I've put together a collection of screenshots for various applications including IE9, Office 2013, Visual Studio 2013, Lightroom, Lightwave, and a few built-in apps: